25 Comments

My husband and I have been working on our on avatars made from scratch. We both have avastar. I went thro all the videos I could find all the step by step guides nothing worked. A friend told me use a older verson of avastar, I didnt want to listen, look at all the pretty buttons and features the new one has, it has to be better I kept telling myself. I tried again and again changing methods following different tips except that one. After all my crying and overfilled inventory of uploads that didnt work. A friend starting sending people to see me in avatars they made themselves they all said they same thing use 1.59 or before so I broke done and gave up all my pretty little buttons and guess what. I finally have her rigged. My thoughts if your higher ones work just as well how about some real updated videos to support them.

About the documentation: We have this at https://avastar.online and we also prefer to provide text documentation over video. But we also add videos as accompanying goodies whenever possible.

We have meanwhile updated about 80% of the documentation to the current Avastar-2 release and we are working on the remaining 20% Please let us know if the avastar.online documentation does not match your needs. We are always all ears for suggestions to make the documentation better 🙂

For the hair creation: We have not yet thought about making hair tools. But we might get there eventually. Then your remarks will indeed become helpful 🙂

thanks again for telling us your opinion 🙂
cheers,
Gaia

prospero.frobozz
on December 10, 2017 at 7:48 pm

I’m a very new user; I purchased it something like a week ago. Thus far, I’ve mostly just played around with it. I experimented with the animation system (creating a, er, certain gesture that I could make with new Bento hands). I’ve also used the easy access to the avatar (with UV maps) to test textures I’ve made… which I recognize isn’t an Avastar feature at all, but could have been done with freely available templates, but, what the heck, I used the built-in “make me a avatar model” function to get it in place.

One thing I would really like: written documentation and tutorials of things. You do have a fair amount of things. One thing I’ve found with Blender in general is that people much more often do video tutorials than they do written tutorials or documentation. And, the video tutorials are great… but you can’t scan them the way you can scan written documentation to find out if it’s what you’re really looking for. Sometimes, having the written documentation there is far more efficient (esp. if you want to remember one detail — finding things in Blender can be tough, because there’s so much there) than video tutorials, even though video tutorials are more approachable when you’re first learning something.

Here’s a pie-in-the-sky request 😀 Blender has a great hair engine. But, if you turn it into polys, you get ten billion triangles. (I’ve used the convert to mesh, convert to curve, bevel, convert to mesh approach.) This is by its various nature, because blender hair is lots and lots of strands. If there were *some* way we could model hair in Blender, and then use that to make an approximation of mesh hair we could upload to SL, that would be awesome. I know this is asking a whole lot, though, because the two things are just so different.

One lesser thing that would be nice would be the ability to bake your hair onto a mesh as a texture to use with skins, clothes, or things like Omega appliers. I think you could accomplish this by just having a version of the avatar mesh that is spread out in 2d so that its geometry exactly exactly matches the geometry of the UV map. You could then grow hair on that flattened mesh and use an ortographic render to make a texture. This of course wouldn’t get mesh hair, but you could use it to make hair textures that fit on an avatar.